


Sarasvati

by Consultingnerds (orphan_account)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Ending, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, I'll tag more later - Freeform, I'm so sorry, Stiles Dies, minor description of blood/violence, sadness possibly perceived as depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-01
Updated: 2014-05-01
Packaged: 2018-01-21 11:19:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1548686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Consultingnerds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison died in Scott's arms. Stiles dies in Lydia's. After, she dreams of swirling darkness and sharp blades that reflect light even when there isn't any and blood (so much blood) and yellow police tape and white sheets and blood curdling screams. She stops dreaming. She stops sleeping.</p><p>EDIT: This has been rewritten and now exists under the title "Hiraeth"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sarasvati

**Author's Note:**

> So I've never really written Isaac/Lydia before, but I've absolutely fallen in love with the pairing. Please don't hate me if they're too ooc, because I'm trying to accurately portray the grieving we were deprived of on the show. Also, I probably didn't read through this enough times, so please forgive the mistakes.

The world doesn’t stop for them after Allison’s death, not like they think it should. The Nogitsune wreaks havoc, school still piles on hours and hours of homework, Lydia’s parents continue to be absent. She does get a call from her mother one night, asking if she’s all right, saying she heard about Allison, and “isn’t that just awful, wasn’t she in a few of your classes?” The whole conversation feels forced and more than a little like her mother felt obligated to speak to her than anything else. Lydia continues to be astounded with how little her parents truly know about her life. She calls Scott immediately after hanging up, and he drives to her house (even though it’s nearing two a.m.) and takes her for greasy curly fries and milkshakes at the twenty-four hour diner just off the highway.

They make a point not to mention anything vaguely supernatural related, and he very kindly doesn’t ask about her mother. It’s strange really. Two years ago she looked at Scott like gum scraped off the sole of her Miu Miu wedge sandals, and now he’s one of her best friends, second only to Allison. (Stiles is her best friend, too but he’s also something more, and that something more is so complicated that she doesn’t bother labeling it.) The sun is rising when he drops her back off at her empty house, and she gives him a grateful smile as she climbs out of his mom’s car.

The next day (exactly one week and three days after Allison dies) Kira calls Scott, who calls Lydia, and tells them that she found a way to kill the Nogitsune and save Stiles. It’s not going to be easy, she warns, but Lydia and Scott both agree that they’re willing to try anything at this point.

:/:

Of course, it turns out that Kira’s plan is more than a little tricky. They have to trap the Nogitsune, first of all, and to do that they’ll have to find it first. Then Kira – and the ancient parchment unearthed from Kira’s mom’s things made it very clear that it has to be Kira, something about lightning fox magic (the translation wasn’t exactly accurate) – has to put her sword through the Nogitsune’s heart. That should destroy the trickster spirit, but leave the host (Stiles) unharmed.  
It takes another week and the help of an escaped mental patient to track the Nogitsune and set the trap. They choose the school as the setting, to give them the home field advantage, so to speak. Isaac, Derek, and the twins will wait outside in case they need them. Scott, Lydia, and Kira will take on the Nogitsune inside. The plan should go seamlessly. It doesn’t. 

:/:

The day the pack is supposed to execute the plan, Aiden and Ethan are shot at in the woods by a hunter. Aiden is hit, but after Deaton cleans him up, he insists he can still help. Derek and Scott agree, but only because they need all the help they can get. Kira, Scott, and Lydia have just the trapped Nogitsune when things begin to go wrong. Lydia can feel that something’s not right, can feel the banshee wail building inside her, but she forces it down, because no one else is supposed to die tonight. When Ethan howls from outside, Scott looks torn. Kira and Lydia assure him that “they’ve got everything under control, go help them!” he gives them a pained look before racing outside. They watch him, go, then turn back to the Nogitsune and begin the ritual. Lydia tries not to stumble too much over the Japanese words that feel sharp and awkward on her tongue. Kira finishes her incantation first, and raises her sword to strike the Nogitsune down. In that moment, Lydia knows it won’t work. She can see it in the smirk on the dark spirit’s face just before Kira’s blade pierces it’s heart.

The Nogitsune’s skin begins to crack, and it struggles to stay upright as Kira sinks her sword into its chest. She pulls the sword out, and it’s smeared with blood, human blood. The Nogitsune laughs, and crumbles to dust. The dust blows away in an invisible wind and disappears into the cracks of the floors and the lockers. They look at each other in disbelief. Stiles is standing in front of them, and Lydia can tell it’s really him because of the way he’s looking at her. It’s really him, he’s okay, and she has never been so glad to be wrong in her life.

“Is…is that it? We’re all still alive?” Lydia asks tentatively. She can feel the scream building before the words finish leaving her mouth. She clamps down on it. She won’t let this one out. She doesn’t care if her throat bleeds and the blood vessels in her eyes burst. She won’t let him die now. “Yeah,” says Kira breathlessly, like even she can’t believe it actually worked. She doesn’t see the terror in Lydia’s eyes. “I guess…I guess we are.” It all happens so fast after that. So goddamn fast.

1: Stiles crumples to the ground. His head hits the floor with a sickening thud.  
2: A scream like no other rips its way out of Lydia’s throat as she falls to her knees.  
3: Lydia Martin’s whole world falls apart.

“NO!” Lydia screams, because this wasn’t supposed to happen. They were supposed to save him. Distantly, she hears the voices in her head whispering that Aiden’s dying, Aiden’s dead, but her own grief and sorrow drown them out – for once. For the first time since she found out she was a banshee, the voices are completely silent. She cradles Stiles’ face in the palms of her hands and presses kisses to his cheeks, his forehead, his lips. The kisses are wet with her tears, and his blood, but he’s not moving, he isn’t moving, and he’s growing cold and heavy in her arms. Her cries are loud and ugly and angry, and someone wraps their arms around her to take her away from him, but she can’t leave him yet, she can’t, so she holds on to Stiles so hard her arms hurt. “No,” she sobs as the arms wrap around her again. 

Kira panics. “I don’t… I don’t understand why it didn’t work. This was supposed to fix everything! I didn’t mean to – I’m sorry! Just, just wait here, I’ll go get help. It’s going to be okay. Everything will be fine. He’ll be okay, I promise. I’ll be right back.” She sprints down the hall and outside to call for help. Lydia’s eyes never leave Stiles’. They’re still open, staring blankly at her, and Lydia can’t stand it, because he never looked at her like that before. There was always something there – frustration, awe, fear… love. She loves him, she realizes. She has for a while now. For the first time in a very long time, she lets herself feel without thinking. 

Lydia cries, and she shouts, and she begs Stiles to some back to her. She’s still pleading with a dead boy when the doors bang open at the end of the hallway. Startled, she jumps and glances down the hall. She sobs even harder when she sees who’s sprinting towards her. They come to a stop in front of her, and Lydia can’t bear to see the face that lets out such and anguished noise. She pretends she’s alone and continues to mumble frantically.

"I love you, I love you. I'm sorry Stiles, I'm so sorry. Come back to me. Please come back. Please, Stiles. Please! I love you, I love you , I love you." She finally looks up at the Sheriff. There are tear tracks in the blood (his blood, Stiles’ blood) smeared on her face. "I love him." The Sheriff breathes shakily and nods. "I know. He knew. He loved you so -" his voice breaks and he sobs. He sinks to the floor next to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. Lydia wraps her arms around his neck in the tightest embrace she's ever given. "He loved you very much." The Sheriff says into her hair. All she can do is nod and cry harder.

They hold each other until someone - Parrish, she thinks - shows up and pries them away from Stiles. The rest of Beacon Hills' emergency services flood into the hallway of the school that has seen so much tragedy in the past two years, and all of them - every. single. one. - stops dead in their tracks when they see whose body they're cleaning up this time. Parrish blantantly avoids looking at the body as he guides Lydia and the sheriff out of the school into the cold night. The fresh air hurts her lungs, and she wants more than anything in the world to run back into the place she spends forty five suffocating hours every week.

Melissa is waiting for them outside - of course she is. She's pacing back and forth on the other side of the caution tape now strung everywhere. Lydia sees her take in their blood stained faces and clothes and hands, can see the exact moment she realizes what's happened, who didn't come out of the school with them. Her face falls, and she tears down the crime scene tape angrily. She storms over to them and falls into the sheriff's arms. Watching then, Lydia feels like she's intruding on a very private moment. Stiles is...was as much a son to Melissa as Scott is.  
She directs her attention to the devastation around them. It's chaos, police officers and medical personnel hurrying around the rest of the pack, still frozen in their various stages of shock and grief. She'd known, on some level, that Aiden was gone too, she had screamed for him too, after all. But now she's facing the reality of it, now she's seeing the proof. She can't deny it now. Scott is sitting on the ground, arms around his knees, holding himself together. There are four police officers standing around him, and they seem to be figuring out whether they should interrogate him, or arrest him. There are ambulances and fire trucks and just about every police car in Beacon Hills parked haphazardly on the lacrosse field and the courtyard in front of the school. People are rushing around like they don’t know what to tackle first.

There's a commotion behind her and she turns to see them wheeling Stiles out of the school on a stretcher. They've draped a white sheet over him too, and the blood is already beginning to seep through. She feels her legs give out, and she drops to the ground. No one notices her fall. She curls into herself and sobs hysterically. She feels like there's a thousand pound weight on her chest, like she's drowning, like she's buried alive and slowly suffocating. She can't breathe, she can't breathe, because Stiles is dead, and he’s not here to talk her down from her very own panic attack, and she doesn't think this feeling will ever go away.

It’s Isaac who finally pulls her to her feet and away from the scene. Her knees buckle, and she lets herself slump into his chest, fingers curled in his shirt. “No,” she hoarsely protests with what’s left of her voice. He just shakes his head and lets her lean against his side , keeps one arm around her waist and the other gently but firmly cupping her elbow to hold her up as he leads her away. 

He tries to hurry her past Ethan, Aiden, and Derek, but she pushes him away so that she can see. She deserves to suffer, she thinks. She knew her friends were going to die, she felt it, but she didn’t stop it (couldn’t stop it) and she deserves to see all the pain she’s caused. Ethan is holding Aiden and rocking him back and forth, but he’s long gone. Black blood still dribbles from Aiden’s mouth, and he looks more human than Lydia’s ever seen him. She may not have been in love with him, but she did have some feelings for him besides their mutually beneficial hookups. She’s about to turn away when Derek looks up and meets her gaze. He seems so very lost, like for the first time in his life he didn’t have a backup plan for this. Lydia knows he was never very fond of the twins, but he took them in, and let them into his pack, however briefly. And Stiles…Stiles was like his (very annoying) kid brother. Losing a pack member is possibly the worst feeling in the world (she should know by now), losing three within weeks of each other, especially for someone who’s already lost their home and most of their family…it’s got to be devastating.

Lydia’s breath catches in her throat again, and she can feel herself beginning to spiral into another panic attack. She feels Isaac takes her arm and turn her away from the scene. She barely feels her legs wobble before Isaac’s scooping her up and carrying her away from the school. She’d read somewhere once, that a werewolf’s sense of smell is so highly developed that they can smell emotions. She must be positively pungent to Isaac right now. 

:/:

Isaac takes her home in Derek’s car. He eases her into the back seat of the car, and he has to fasten her seatbelt for her because she won’t move, she can’t move. She feels paralyzed. She’s not crying any more. She just stares out the window and tries to suffocate the voices once again whispering in her head. When they pull up in front of her house, all the lights are off. Her mother’s still off gallivanting with her latest barely legal boyfriend on some tropical island. Isaac carries her out of the car and only sets her down long enough to get the spare key from under the door mat. She directs him upstairs to her bedroom, and it’s odd to think that the last time Isaac was in her house, they were (mostly) whole people, a complete pack, gathering for a night of teenage normalcy. 

Isaac sets her on the edge of her bed gingerly. He moves to leave, but she curls her fingers into the sleeve of his sweater and whispers “Stay.” She can’t be alone with the voices tonight. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to be alone with the voices after the things she saw tonight. She needs someone, anyone to keep her company and the voices at bay.

He toes off his shoes and hesitantly sits down at the very edge of her bed. Lydia sighs and puts a hand on his shoulder. She presses gently until he lies back beside her. In the quiet darkness of her room, she can hear him begin to cry softly. After a few minutes, he turns on his side and she scoots over so that she’s pressed against his back. She slides her arms around him so that they come together again over his own arms tucked into his chest. After a moment, Isaac laces their fingers together. She feels his shuddery breaths slowly deepen and even out, until they become soft snores and his body relaxes completely. Lydia lies awake holding him and ignoring the frantic whispering in her mind until the sun begins to peek over the edge of her window sill. Only when the first rays of morning light shine on her does the murmuring quiet enough for her to slip into blissful unconsciousness.

**Author's Note:**

> Thought? Like it? Hate it? Should I continue it (even though the next part is totally already written and will probably be posted regardless)?


End file.
